Campground workers at the Baker Lake Resort on Washington State's Puget Sound were surprised to find a black bear passed out and surrounded by three dozen beer cans. The animal had swiped the suds from campers' coolers and seemed to take a liking to the local brew, Rainier Beer.

The bear was chased away only to return the next day, presumably looking for more beer. Wildlife agents captured the bear using honey, doughnuts and beer for bait.

Monday, December 27, 2004

In January 2003, California resident Cathy Baker walked into her local CompUSA store to return copies of Windows XP and Norton AntiVirus she'd purchased there. When trying to install the programs, she had of course been confronted by all the obnoxious terms in the Windows and NAV End User License Agreements. Instead of clicking OK, she took them back to the store for a refund, as the EULAs said she was supposed to do if she refused to accept the terms.

At CompUSA, however, Baker was told the store's policy was that it could not give refunds for software once the customer has opened the package. Even though Baker had no way of seeing the EULAs until after she purchased the products, took them home, opened the package and tried to install the software on her computer, she was now told she could not get her money back even when she rejected the terms. (In a somewhat bizarre twist, after she protested enough, one CompUSA employee told her that they had "secret instructions" from Symantec to provide refunds in such circumstances.) So, like many others before her, Baker was confronted with the classic shrinkwrap license conundrum: She could only see the terms by opening the box, and opening the box meant she was stuck with it. But Baker did something most others before her had not - she went and got a lawyer...

The e-mail messages are tantalizing: "Join now and receive a free IBM laptop." "Your complimentary iPod with free shipping is waiting."

These offers and similar ones on the Internet promise gifts for buying products or services. Are they for real? At best, yes, but they can also be riddled with problems. Participants may have to spend a lot to qualify or may not get the reward if they fail to follow what can be complicated rules. Ultimately, they may end up with nothing more than a big increase in spam as their e-mail address and other information is passed along or sold.

The first cloned-to-order pet sold in the USA has been delivered to his new owner. According to the article, the process cost $50,000 and the new kitten was cloned from the DNA of the owner's much-beloved prior cat who died last year. The happy owner states, "He is identical. His personality is the same..." Here's the corporate website.

"If I Could Turn Back Time": A team of scientists used "furniture clutter to simultaneously focus two different electromagnetic signals to two specific locations in a room using a single frequency, with an accuracy that would be impossible in an empty room." Clutter is good!...

Saturday, December 18, 2004

"A Precious Case from Middle Earth": The latest issue of The British Medical Journal has a case report on Smeagol, aka "Gollum". Among their conclusions,

"He fulfils seven of the nine criteria for schizoid personality disorder (ICD F60.1), and, if we must label Gollum's problems, we believe that this is the most likely diagnosis... He is hypervigilant and does not seem to need much sleep. This, accompanied by his bulging eyes and weight loss, suggests hyperthyroidism."

Of course, it could also be the effect of the One Ring, something not yet included in the current ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases) codes.

(As a practicing radiologist, I thought the article was especially good in its discussion of the limitations of mammography and breast cancer screening, as well as the gap between the reality of mammography vs. popular perception. Gladwell did a good job integrating a number of complex ideas in medicine and image analysis.)

Are you fed up with bringing bananas to work or school only to find them bruised and squashed? Our unique, patented device allows for the safe transport and storage of individual bananas letting you enjoy perfect bananas anytime, anywhere.

Monday, November 29, 2004

Robert Mugabe, dictator of Zimbabwe, "has come up with a bizarre proposal to solve the food crisis threatening half its population with starvation. [He] wants to bring in obese tourists from overseas so that they can shed pounds doing manual labour on land seized from white farmers."

"Seeing is believing (in the free market)": Alex Tabarrok has some very interesting observations about health care economics.

Everywhere we look it seems that health care is more expensive: prescription drug prices are increasing, costs to visit the doctor are up, the price of health insurance is rising. But look closer, even closer, closer still. Don't see it yet? Perhaps you should have your eyes corrected at a Lasik vision center.

Laser eye surgery has the highest patient satisfaction ratings of any surgery, it has been performed more than 3 million times in the past decade, it is new, it is high-tech, it has gotten better over time and... laser eye surgery has fallen in price. In 1998 the average price of laser eye surgery was about $2200 per eye. Today the average price is $1350, that's a decline of 38 percent in nominal terms and slightly more than that after taking into account inflation.

Why the price decline in this market and not others? Could it have something to do with the fact that laser eye surgery is not covered by insurance, not covered by Medicaid or Medicare, and not heavily regulated? Laser eye surgery is one of the few health procedures sold in a free market with price advertising, competition and consumer driven purchases. I'm seeing things more clearly already.

Invention of the day: A device that separates ripe open pistachio nuts from unriped closed pistachios by their distinctive acoustic signatures. The new system is cheaper and more accurate than the current mechanical sorters, and as a pistachio addict I heartily applaud this development!

Although I don't agree with everything he says, for the most part I find his writing thought-provoking and inspiring, both for the actual content of his arguments as well as the underlying optimistic American sense of life. As a supporter of the 2nd Amendment, I especially liked "Freedom". For a fun discussion of capitalism in America, read "Trinity". For an essentialized analysis of our great political divide, read "Responsibility". And for some good counterweights to the conventional wisdom promulgated by the mainstream press on America's role in the world (in general) and the Iraq War (in particular), read "Empire", "War","Strength" and "Deterrence".

(Editor's note: Normally, I keep GeekPress fairly apolitical, since the primary focus of this website is science, technology, and cultural news that I happen to find interesting. But occasionally on the weekends I'll invoke my blogger's prerogative and indulge in more explicitly political posting. If you don't want to read anything political, then skip this entire post -- regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow. If you live in Blue America, and you have a genuine interest in knowing why the other side thinks as it does, then take a peek at some of the above links. And if you live in Red America, then bon appetit!)

Thursday, November 18, 2004

Internet hunting: "Hunters soon may be able to sit at their computers and blast away at animals on a Texas ranch via the Internet, a prospect that has state wildlife officials up in arms. The Web site already offers target practice with a .22 caliber rifle and could soon let hunters shoot at deer, antelope and wild pigs, site creator John Underwood said on Tuesday." Here's the website.

Sunday, November 14, 2004

Joke of the day:

A couple is golfing one day on a very, very exclusive golf course lined with million dollar houses. On the third tee the husband says, "Honey, be very careful when you drive the ball. Don't knock out any windows it'll cost us a fortune to fix."

The wife tees up and promptly shanks it right through the window of the biggest house on the course. The husband cringes and says, "I told you to watch out for the houses! All right, let's go up there, apologize and see how much this is going to cost."

They walk up and knock, and a voice says, "Come in."

When they open the door, they see glass all over the floor and a broken bottle lying on its side in the foyer. A man on the couch says, "Are you the people that broke my window?"

"Uh, yeah," the husband says. "Sorry about that."

"No, actually I want to thank you. I'm a Genie that was trapped for a thousand years in that bottle. You've released me. I'm allowed to grant three wishes. I'll give you each one wish, and I'll keep the last one for myself."

"OK, great!" the husband says. "I want a million dollars a year for the rest of my life."

"No problem - it's the least I could do.

And you, what do you want?" the Genie says, looking at the wife.

"I want a house in every country of the world," she says.

"Consider it done."

"And what's your wish, Genie?" the husband asks.

"Well, since I've been trapped in that bottle, I haven't had sex with a woman in a thousand years.

My wish is to sleep with your wife."

The husband looks at the wife and says, "Well, we did get a lot of money and all those houses, honey. I guess it's OK with me if it's OK with you."

So the genie takes the wife upstairs and ravishes her for two hours.

Afterward, he rolls over, looks at the wife, and says, "How old is your husband anyway?"

"A device that automatically moves electrodes through the brain to seek out the strongest signals is taking the idea of neural implants to a new level. Scary as this sounds, its developers at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena say devices like this will be essential if brain implants are ever going to work..."

More very cool Red-vs.-Blue maps:These maps are especially nice because they show the red and blue states (or counties) with areas adjusted for population. The purple versions are also quite visually striking. (Via IPList.)

"Who Knows?":Excellent article on Wikipedia and how it works. One interesting tidbit:

To put Wikipedia's achievements in numerical context, at the same time it was celebrating the publishing of its one millionth entry (a Hebrew article on the Kazakhstan flag) in less than four years, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography launched its latest edition. It had taken 12 years to complete, yet contained a comparatively tiddly 55,000 biographies. It also cost some £25m to create. Wikipedia has so far been bankrolled by Wales, but the total cost so far is still around £300,000.

The current Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has more than 250m words in it. Britannica's most recent edition has 65,000 entries in print and 75,000 entries online. Wikipedia's English site has some 360,000 entries and is growing every day.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Update on "arrested for not leaving a tip": Back in September 2004, a man was arrested for not leaving a "mandatory" 18% tip after dining in a restaurant as part of a party of 8. So what happened? The district attourney ultimately dropped the charges. The key point was that the restaurant menu described the 18% requirement for large parties as a "gratuity" (i.e., at the customer's discretion), not a "surcharge" (i.e. mandatory).

Sunday, October 24, 2004

Friday, October 22, 2004

"Researchers at The University of Manchester and Chernogolovka, Russia have discovered the world's first single-atom-thick fabric, which reveals the existence of a new class of materials and may lead to computers made from a single molecule." (Via Linkfilter.)

It's one thing to say a ferret's understanding of reality is being reproduced inside his brain, but there's nothing to say that our understanding of the world is accurate. In a way, our neural structure imposes a certain structure on the outside world, and all we know is that at least one other mammalian brain seems to impose the same structure. Either that or The Matrix freaked out the ferrets the way it did everyone else.

(For the record, I disagree with the concept of consciousness "imposing a structure on the outside world", but I found the article entertaining nonetheless.) Via GMSV.

Mindball [is] a game developed at the Interactive Institute where two players sit at a table and control a small steel ball with their EEG activity. (Actually, your brainwaves control a magnet under the table that moves the ball, but it *seems* as if you're controlling the ball directly.) By relaxing your mind, you can make the ball roll over to the opponent's goal. So to win, you have to "out chill" the other person. I was skeptical, until I actually sat down to play against my friend Nick Philip, an ambient DJ/artist who is in the business of chilling. He beat me every time.

A new mathematical system for ranking colleges, which is more robust and less likely to be "gamed" by the schools under consideration. It uses a "revealed preferences" method similar to that used to rank chess players. More information here.

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Update on climate change article: This is obviously a controversial topic. Here's one critique of the article cited below, forwarded to me by reader Eric Anderson. At this point, I can only say that I'm not sufficiently knowledgable about the relevant mathematics and statistics to make a more informed comment at this time.

"Global warming bombshell": One of the most damning pieces of evidence supposedly proving that human activity has been responsible for global warming has been shown to be due to a mathematical artifact.

"Welcome to the secretive world of golf ball retrieval". Typically, a retriever pays a golf course 5-10 cents per found ball for the exclusive rights to collect balls on their property. The retriever profiled in the story collects around 1,000 to 3,000 balls a day or 150,000 to 300,000 per year. After he cleans them, "he can resell them for anywhere between thirty cents for a dud range ball to two bucks for the gold-standard Titleist Pro V1x". As the article says, "You do the math..." (Via Obscure Store.)

The experimental design enabled the researchers to discover the specific brain regions activated when the subjects used only taste information versus when they also had brand identification. While the researchers found no influence of brand knowledge for Pepsi, they found a dramatic effect of the Coke label on behavioral preference. The brand knowledge of Coke both influenced their preference and activated brain areas including the "dorsolateral prefrontal cortex" and the hippocampus. Both of these areas are implicated in modifying behavior based on emotion and affect. In particular, wrote the researchers, their findings suggest "that the hippocampus may participate in recalling cultural information that biases preference judgments."

I predict this is just the beginning of the neuromarketing cola wars. (Via Boing Boing.)

Saturday, October 16, 2004

San Francisco will start using a ranked-choice voting system for their municipal elections. In theory, this could create an incentive for voters to choose their favored third-party candidates as their first choice, knowing that they can still list a major party candidate as their second choice.

Friday, October 15, 2004

How to get your name off the Federal "Do Not Fly" list: According to this article, "... all you need to do to get off a do-not-fly-list is modify your name in some way by adding a middle initial or a suffix. In other words, the folks responsible for the list are too stupid to figure out how to prevent false positives, but a true terrorist can get off the list by adding a middle initial. This information comes directly from 'TSA Spokesman Mark Hatfield' as quoted in the article." (Via Politech.)

Wednesday, October 13, 2004

Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma: For many years, the optimal strategy has been the Tit-For-Tat strategy, in which the computer player mirrored its opponents' moves. However, during the recent 20th Anniversary Competition, a new consistent winner emerged using a radically different approach known as the Southampton Strategy.

The last Washington Redskins home football game prior to a presidential election has correctly predicted the election winner going back to 1936. (The Redskins did not exist as a franchise prior to 1936.) This year, the critical game will be on October 31, against the Green Bay Packers. If the pattern holds true for 2004, then a Redskins victory = Bush, Packer victory = Kerry. (Of course, I think it's all a coincidence, since there are any number of possible "predictive" sports streaks, and sooner or later one is bound to match this pattern of 17 straight election results. But I still find it interesting nonetheless...)

Thursday, October 07, 2004

Update on XP vulnerability: A couple of people have pointed out that this is not a new discovery. Apparently, using any other OS boot CT (with appropriate file system software) allows one to bypass the OS not used. Thanks to Bryce Wilcox and Stewart Vardaman for writing in. So the story might not be as big a deal as portrayed in the article.

Windows XP, which has been marketed by Microsoft as "the most secure version ever," has been found to have a flaw so bone-headed that it renders passwords ineffective as a means of keeping people out of your PC.

Reader Tony DeMartino alerted me to the problem, which all administrators of Windows XP machines should immediately take to heart:

Anyone with a Windows 2000 CD can boot up a Windows XP box and start the Windows 2000 Recovery Console, a troubleshooting program.

Windows XP then allows the visitor to operate as Administrator without a password, even if the Administrator account has a strong password.

The visitor can also operate in any of the other user accounts that may be present on the XP machine, even if those accounts have passwords.

Unbelievably, the visitor can copy files from the hard disk to a floppy disk or other removable media - something even an Administrator is normally prevented from doing when using the Recovery Console.

The Vickrey Auction: If you're selling a valuable item via sealed-bid auction, it might be to your advantage to use the Vickrey auction system, in which the item goes to the highest bidder, but he or she gets it for the price of the second-highest bid. Mathematician Francis Su explains why.

Sunday, October 03, 2004

The Earth's temperature may have fluctuated more wildly during the past 2000 years than previously thought, according to a new study that challenges how researchers use tree rings and corals to give us a picture of the Earth's past.

If true, the study suggests that recent warming might not be as unique as was thought previously, and might partly be due to natural temperature cycles, rather than humans spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Monday, September 27, 2004

"Ins and Outs of Teledildonics":Wired has a review of the Sinulator, a remote cybersex device that connects to the USB port of one's personal computer. As the article explains, "...a man can be thrusting in Cleveland while a woman is penetrated in Seattle, and the cybersex experience gets one step closer to the holodeck."

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Invention of the day: Israeli weapons researchers have created a new non-lethal weapon -- "the ultimate stink bomb, with a disgusting smell that lingers in its victim's clothing for up to five years." (Via DefenseTech.)

Monday, September 20, 2004

That is the control panel from an old naval nuclear reactor. On the far right is the EPCP (electric plant control panel) where the electrical operator on watch ("EO") controls power flows and breaker positions (notice the schematic laid out with switches for breakers). In the middle section is where the reactor operator ("RO") sits. He shims the control rods up and down in the reactor core with the lever (the L shaped lever just in front of the horizontal bar) and on the left is the throttleman station (usually manned by electricians). The large wheel is used to open/close ahead steam valves to the propusion shaft, while the smaller wheel is used to open/close back steam (astern throttles). The two wheels would be used in conjunction with each other to get the shaft to stop from a forward rotation, and then go in reverse (ahead steam is removed and astern steam applied to stop the shaft). The different gauges are specific to each station, with the throttleman concerned about power to steam flow ratios, steam pressures, etc. The RO cares about primary water avg. (coolant) temp, pressures, etc. The EO is watching vital bus voltages, and charging the battery with a trickle charge.

Thought you may like to know that (I used to sit on the far right, but on a newer version of that same panel).

Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However, the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the FORTRAN language, the computer will be easy to use...

I just want to know what the giant steering wheel will be used for. (Via Metafilter.)

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Bicycle security article of the day: "Your brand new U-Lock is not safe." Warning - read the entire thread before you try this with one of your own Kryptonite bicycle locks, since the technique might ruin your lock.

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

"The right and left human earsprocess sound differently, according to scientists who studied the hearing of babies and found the right ear better at picking up speech-like sounds and the left more attuned to music."

The real-life "Soup Nazi" from Seinfeld will be going national. The stores will be called "The Original Soup Man" and franchises can be purchased for $30,000 (plus 5% of the gross sales). BTW, the owner Al Yeganeh hates Jerry Seinfeld, and the franchises will not be allowed to use the term "Soup Nazi" in their promotional literature.

Brain scan studies show that dyslexia is not the same in every culture. In particular, dyslexics reading character-based languages (like Chinese) have different brain abnormalities than dyslexics reading alphabet-based languages (like English). More information here.